C > C's Quotes

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“Let me conclude by saying in my experience the glittering prizes in life come more to those who persevere despite setback and disappointment than they do to the exceptionally gifted who, with the confidence of the talents bestowed upon them, often pursue the tasks leading to success with less determination.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“The reversion of Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa.”
― Neal Stephenson

“Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in different contexts.”
― Neal Stephenson

“Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces....

We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.”
― Neal Stephenson

“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.”
― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

“A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.”
― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

“Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.”
― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

“The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.”
― Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as “banks,” and every fairy tale is worth a fortune.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Grow up and be different and don’t let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“the best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made-up.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Offering to help with carpooling will come at the cost of your time, gas budget, and likely your sleep, but you will learn more about what is going on in your daughter’s personal life in the time it takes to drop off her friends and get back to your home than you will in three weeks of asking about how things are going. Wise chauffeurs know it’s best to really play the part; trying to join the conversation or ask questions usually breaks the spell and ends the chatter or—even worse—gets the girls to take the conversation to their phones.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“The masters could not bring water to boil, harness to horse or strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them. We had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“Your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be the roses that grow in the concrete.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Besties before testes.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I've taught myself to speak with two different voices and only say certain things around certain people. I’ve mastered it.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“People are realizing and shouting and marching and demanding. They’re not forgetting. I think that’s the most important part.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give